Upton Sinclair, the Forgotten Novelist

Soon it will again be the season of elections. It seems only yesterday that the United States of America elected a new president, followed by an inauguration as splendid, absent the elephants and chariots, as the coronation of a Roman emperor. It is only yesterday that we went again to the ballot box in this country. This is not however a contemplation upon the presidential election, nor indeed of our own. Rather, it is a reflection upon other momentous elections in the United States, the not dissimilar times in which they were conducted, and a contestant in, and chronicler of them.

I start as I will end, with the contestant and the chronicler, the neglected author Upton Sinclair. He wrote of many elections. They included those that returned F.D. Roosevelt as President, and of another, for the governorship of California, in which he was himself a contestant, which occurred during the Great Depression.

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore in 1878 and died in New Jersey ninety years later, having written about as many books as the years of his life. He also wrote as a journalist, polemicist, essayist, critic and political pamphleteer. His earliest triumph was the novel The Jungle, written when he was only twenty-eight. As with other of his writings and activities during his long life, it had a marked impact on influential people and public affairs. One of the former was Winston Churchill (I am grateful to Andrew Curtin who brought this review to my attention) who reviewed it in June 1905 for a short-lived American monthly. Within a few weeks of its publication, it had, Churchill wrote, “become famous … It [had already] agitated the machinery of a State Department … disturbed … the Old World and the New … and perhaps the consciences of mankind.”

It is not far-fetched to imagine Churchill’s dilemma, agony perhaps, in writing his review. Every political tenet to which he subscribed was opposed to the thorough and unshrinking socialist purpose which the author of The Jungle sought to advance. It is also easy to see that Churchill, emotional and sentimental as he notoriously was, found himself deeply moved by the book and bound to give it its due as an informative, powerful and engrossing novel. He unflinchingly quotes passages which expose the greed and oppressions of the barons of the Beef Trust of Chicago. He empathises with Sinclair’s poor migrant workers whose way of life was so far removed from his, which began at Blenheim Palace. Churchill cannot help however railing at the ending of the book, describing as unsatisfactory to the general reader the hero’s salvation in an honest and unswerving socialism.

Churchill, by fifty years or so, anticipated my own admiration of Sinclair, as a “shrewd delineator of character and a careful exponent of detail”. This was not excessive praise, as I will later show. The author’s reach extended to “social, moral, economic, political, commercial and bacteriological affairs”. His reference to the engagement of a Department of State is apposite. Sinclair’s book was the spur for the introduction of the first comprehensive hygiene and food laws in the United States, and a considerable improvement in working conditions. Sinclair was ahead of his time. He used his royalties from the book to set up the Helicon Home Colony, an early form of commune (without the acid and marijuana), and the first socialist community in the United States.

Sinclair travelled widely. Although he became a true citizen of the world he never forgot his American roots. He understood the great studios of Hollywood as well as the molten furnaces of Pittsburgh. Despite his socialism, he had a taste for the grand hotels of the world, the Waldorf and the Plaza in New York, the Savoy in London, the Adlon in Berlin, and the Ritz in Paris. He interested and educated himself in history, especially European history, economics, literature, painting, sculpture, dance and drama. He was an habitué of the famous museums and opera houses of Europe and North America.

All of that is far remote from Brisbane in 1953, or, for that matter, the meatworks of Chicago in 1905, although, as David Malouf has thoughtfully observed, Brisbane is the most North American of all the Australian cities, Sydney’s masonry and steel towers notwithstanding. Malouf put it down to the hundreds of thousands of American military personnel who passed through Brisbane during the Second World War. There were many links forged in those times. The Brisbane artist Caroline Barker told me that several American artists serving in their forces shared her Brisbane studio with Australian artists, including Bill Dargie, who was then an official Australian war artist.

As a child, I was much impressed by that American presence. My mother’s cousin had three glamorous daughters. The family lived not far from an American canteen on the river at New Farm. Words such as honey pot, magnet and moths to the flame are not enough to convey those young women’s drawing power. My elder brother and I were regular visitors to the household. It was there that I smoked my first Lucky and drank my first Coca-Cola. Scorched and crumpled warships sometimes edged down the river, and twin-hulled Lockheed Lightnings flashing across the skies were familiar sights. 

These childhood encounters provided an early introduction to American power, and the place of that nation in the world. By 1953 when I came to read Sinclair’s World’s End, the introductory volume of his, as the current fashion has it, “magisterial” World’s End series, in total thousands of pages, I was receptive to some of the ideas and the ways of American life of which, among other things, he wrote.

The hero of the series, Lanny Budd, is the illegitimate son of the heir to a dynasty of American arms manufacturers and a beautiful artist’s model. They do not marry because she selflessly does not wish her lover to be expelled from his God-fearing, puritanical family. Nonetheless, the mother and Lanny live an idyllic life amply sustained by Lanny’s father.

The saga begins in 1913, with Lanny in early adolescence, a child of the Riviera, as the storm clouds of war gather. In the series Lanny Budd has many less than credible adventures, and fortuitously meets almost all the important people of the day: Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Ramsay MacDonald, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and F.D. Roosevelt, to name just a few. The author himself probably lost count. The situations are often preposterous. In one episode Lanny travels into Germany and has cordial meetings with Hitler whilst the two nations are at war. The implausibility did not matter: Sinclair’s readership over decades was enormous.

Sinclair deserves a series on himself. He was a man of immense energy as well as some eccentricity. The eleven World’s End novels were only part of his huge output.

He believed in spiritualism. One of the characters who makes regular appearances in the series is a Polish peasant woman, who, in her trances, speaks in several seemingly genuine accents, including those of a long-deceased North American Indian chief. Lanny Budd’s second wife is an amateur, unwitting medium. Sinclair had many affairs, excoriating himself for his unfaithfulness before sinning again. He professed not to be a Christian but believed in an afterlife: hence his attraction to spiritualism.

Politically Sinclair was always on the left, sometimes on the far left, but never quite a communist, although there are times when he writes as if he were one of Lenin’s useful idiots. In the novels, he depicts F.D. Roosevelt as not just a great man, but as a saintly genius, always standing firm against the bloated captains of industry, fascism and the excesses of capitalism. In real life, at times Sinclair had a somewhat more critical opinion of Roosevelt.

Photographs of Sinclair in the 1930s show a well-dressed, rather sleek looking man, one who takes trouble with his appearance, a rather vain man, but one of insight and intelligence, with a sense of humour. It was the last that led him to write amusingly and self-deprecatingly about his major direct foray into politics: the securing of the Democrats’ candidacy for the governorship of California in 1934, despite his professed and open support for socialism. Sinclair’s books are always full of information; I, Candidate for Governor, his account of this political campaign is no exception. If you think politics in this country are rugged, then you should read Sinclair’s experience of them in his country back then, during the Depression.

In I, Candidate he tells many anecdotes:

When I first came to California nineteen years ago, I met Harry Carr of the Los Angeles Times … He remarked to me: “Sinclair, it has been so long since I have written anything I believed, that I wouldn’t know the feeling.”

Sinclair wrote of attempts to film his novels The Jungle and The Money Changers:

Twenty years ago the late Augustus Thomas made a really honest version of The Jungle. That caused me to have hopes but they were quickly dashed. I sold to a movie concern a story telling about a self-confident rich young man who made a wager that he could go out as a hobo and get a quick start in life. When I next heard of that story, it had to do with a lost will. Soon after the War, my old friend Ben Hampton, historian of the industry, undertook to make a picture of The Money Changers, which tells how J.P. Morgan caused the panic of 1907. When I went to see it, it was a story of the drug traffic in Chinatown.

Of his novel Oil he wrote, “[It] has been read by every concern in the business—I suppose a dozen agents have set out full of confidence to handle it, but never have they reported but one thing: ‘Magnificent, but dangerous’.” I am not at all sure that Sinclair would be gratified by the recent film There Will Be Blood starring Daniel Day Lewis, into which the novel was finally made. 

Sinclair’s movement in the thirties—it was a movement rather than a party—was called, “End Poverty in California”, soon shortened to “EPIC”. Jarvis N. Gregory in the introduction to I, Candidate describes Sinclair’s tilt at public office as one of the most amusing electoral contests in twentieth-century American politics: others saw it as a threat to democracy in California. The EPIC campaign was undoubtedly influential. It caused Roosevelt to expand and accelerate a number of his New Deal policies. Gregory points out that the contest was also remarkable for being the first of what is now commonplace, the showering of money, and popularity by association, by Hollywood on its preferred candidate (these days almost always a Democrat). Sinclair’s great coup in his own campaign was to change his voter registration to Democrat in September 1933. His grand design was to set up a network of co-operative colonies for the unemployed, locating them in idle factories and vacant farmlands to be seized under the constitutional doctrine of “eminent domain”, or, by the imposition of confiscatory taxes. Sinclair never admitted it, but the fact was that his model was the Soviet collective farm. He could be quixotic as well as idealistic.

The Communist Party, initially hostile to EPIC, but keen as always to infiltrate and control front organisations, tried to take it over after it gained a number of seats in the various state houses and municipalities. The violent struggle that followed shaped Sinclair’s suspicion and ultimate rejection of communism and even a reluctant questioning of socialism, discernible in the last of the Lanny Budd books.

Some pages of I, Candidate are devoted to Sinclair’s obtaining of an appointment with Roosevelt, or, as he and others called him, “The Squire of Hyde Park”. He declined to reveal what passed between them but we do know that Roosevelt referred Sinclair to Harry Hopkins, the man whom the President trusted above anyone else, and who was to play a vital role in the amelioration of some of the worst aspects of the Depression in the United States, and a key role in the making and sustenance of the Atlantic alliance during the Second World War. Hopkins promised his co-operation with Sinclair if the latter were to be elected governor of California. Roosevelt’s personal attitude to Sinclair was, however, ambivalent. EPIC had the potential to destabilise the Democrats and move them further to the left than he would have liked, just as extremists have from time to time threatened the generally moderate approaches of both major political parties in this country.

Sinclair’s close but unsuccessful contest for governor was not his first tilt at electoral office. In the year of the publication of The Jungle, the Socialist Party of America endorsed him as a candidate for the Congress of the state of New Jersey. He obtained 3 per cent of the vote; in California in 1934 he attracted a vote of more than 40 per cent.

There are other comparisons with present times. Roy Jenkins, in his short biography of Roosevelt, tells of the economic crisis which faced Roosevelt immediately before and after his inauguration in early 1933. There had been a run on the banks. Eleanor, the President’s wife, had worried about paying the bill at the Mayflower Hotel, where the two stayed pending their installation in the White House. As with Bush and Obama, the outgoing President was in contact with Roosevelt and co-operated with him to secure the speedy passage of the Emergency Banking Bill, so much so that it passed through both houses on the same day without even a printed copy being available to the members. Roosevelt signed it into law that evening. Soon afterwards Roosevelt began to give his “fireside chats” on the radio to instil confidence in the demoralised nation, a practice which he was to follow until shortly before his death in his fourth term of office.

Roosevelt launched many projects to soften the impact of the depression: a civilian conservation corps of unemployed to clean up the national parks at a wage of a dollar a day; incentives to farmers not to produce so as to reduce gluts; and the expansion of electricity production in the Tennessee Valley, one of the most impoverished parts of the nation. Roosevelt also incidentally achieved great popularity with many, but not his wife, by abolishing prohibition.

It is said that John Maynard Keynes’s theories were not then broadly known or understood. It is true that he enjoyed nothing like the prestige that he was to carry with him to Bretton Woods ten years later. Roy Jenkins refers to Roosevelt’s policies as a “sort of stumbling Keynesianism”. I am inclined to think that they were more deliberate than that.

Statistics were much less rigorously collected then. I have however seen tables that suggest that such Keynesian policies as were adopted were not very effective; and that unemployment in the United States until 1939 was higher than in other countries such as Britain and Australia where the so-called classical theory of economics, of balancing the budget, was generally applied. In Australia then, as in recent times, there were however funds devoted to public works of otherwise low priority to relieve unemployment. The playing field at my state primary school at Coorparoo was one such project. It was excavated out of hard shale and rock, and levelled largely by manual labour. There were of course dual objects in the United States, of seeking to end the Depression, and of improving harsh labour conditions of the kind of which Sinclair wrote in The Jungle.

Neither Roosevelt nor any Australian government of the day would have dreamed of ladling out $900 each to the citizenry to spend on holidays in Bali, imported goods from other countries, in the casinos, or otherwise indiscriminately. The jury remains out on the effect of that and other stimulus measures in Australia, even for those who subscribe to the view that money spent goes round and round. No one can deny however our great good fortune in the coincidence of our abundance of minerals and expertise in extracting them, and a current insatiable Chinese appetite for them. The only antidote to the Depression in the United States was war, a war which although it created a huge demand for American products, practically bankrupted Britain, the principal purchaser of them.

Of particular interest in Roosevelt’s program was the effective suspension of competition policy and law. The advocates of a strictly regulated competitive environment in Australia warn that there should be no weakening of competitive resolve or regulation by reason of any recession or even depression here. It is difficult to understand how the largesse of borrowed cash, or the backing of banks, car dealers and car manufacturers, can be reconciled with robust competition. Perhaps Oliver Wendell Holmes’s view of competition law, that it penalises the successful and rewards the incompetent, deserves reconsideration.

President Obama still faces many similar problems to those that confronted Roosevelt. It is in the interests of the whole world that he find solutions to them. God forbid that there be another war, whether non-nuclear or not, that might otherwise, as in the early 1940s, provide the economic cure. 

I return to the World’s End series. Lanny Budd, the hero, is always on the spot; provoking Mussolini, regularly meeting Goering, who regards him as a friend, and Hitler, and attending as a young man the peace conference at Versailles, passing judgment on Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and other world leaders who participated in it. There is even a reference to Billy Hughes’s insistence that Australia be given, as crumbs from the victorious rich men’s table, New Guinea and some other Pacific islands. According to Sinclair, Clemenceau begged Lloyd George to continue bringing “his savages”, meaning particularly Hughes, to the conferences. Their unreasonableness and territorial avarice would serve as a useful distraction from the aggressive colonial aims of the French.

There is no plot in the World’s End novels in the sense of a beginning, a middle and a surprising denouement. For more than thirty years, from Budd’s youth until middle age, he continues to meet the tout monde, and conditions of life more varied than even Churchill noted in his review, mixing not only with statesmen and dictators, but also with artists, dancers—at one point Isadora Duncan attempts to seduce him—art dealers, armaments manufacturers, socialists, communists, capitalists, spies, Gestapo officers, film stars, actors, musicians, psychics, martyrs, playboys and playgirls. He cruises on yachts, bathes and spear fishes in the Mediterranean. In early adolescence he is seduced by an aristocratic English girl, slightly older than he, and for many years has, as his amie, with the acquiescence of her perverted husband, a beautiful sensitive older French woman. Indeed there are few women who can resist him, although he valiantly but politely rejects the advances of any whom he cannot truly love. The narrative does have various redemptive strands, and a climax, although it is rather obvious early, and too long delayed.

If you think all of this unlikely to attract a large readership, you would be wrong. In 1943 one of the series, The Dragon’s Teeth, dedicated to the Russian people at war, won the Pulitzer Prize. The books sold in the millions and millions. They were translated into many languages. Why, you ask?

Churchill has already supplied part of the answer. Another part is, I think, that they were so informative. Sinclair knew such a lot about so many things. The information is imparted interestingly. Despite the fact that Sinclair saw the world through a socialist prism, he was generally accurate and reasonably detached in describing actual events, and the personalities of the important people influencing them. He wrote very quickly but fluently. It does not seem to matter that the situations are far-fetched. He gave the reader a dress-circle seat at the most exciting and dangerous happenings of the century.

He was as accurate on other topics as he was with his history. I mention only one of these: art, specifically painting. He was familiar with the works of the modern masters. He had a good knowledge of the old masters. He understood the art market. One of his most interesting minor characters, of whom there are hundreds, is an émigré Hungarian art dealer who resides in Paris. Lanny Budd himself becomes an art dealer. It is in this role, and as the trusted son of an American arms dealer, that he and Goering buy paintings from each other. In addition to art dealing, he works as a secret agent, a dollar-a-day man, reporting directly to President Roosevelt.

Sinclair almost always writes didactically. His didacticism is saved, I think, by his passion. It was his passion, as well as his faultless eye for detail that moved Churchill so much, despite their very different political persuasions. The best North American authors do tend to be more passionate than their English contemporaries. Perhaps the recently deceased Louis Auchincloss, lawyer and author, with his knowing insiders’ eye for the vanities and misfortunes of the rich but not famous families of the east coast of the United States, and who wrote many of his numerous novels at the same time as Sinclair was writing his, comes closest to an American Anthony Powell. 

A further reason for the success of Sinclair’s Lanny Budd books is their blend of glamour, luxe and idealism. Sinclair, by allowing Budd to enjoy all the advantages and entrées that wealth confers, while remaining wedded to his altruistic ideals, implies that you can have it all; not an unwelcome suggestion to any young man or woman.

While it is true that Lanny Budd bravely exposes himself to great dangers, all of which the reader knows he will surmount, and regularly donates to good causes and good people, he still lives a life of ease and privilege. It is only when he inherits a fortune from a doting rich widow, at the end of the series, that he makes a grand gesture of applying most of his own money and the inheritance to the cause, if not quite of socialism, of something very like it. In the meantime, the reader is taken on many fascinating excursions. One of these is Budd’s enlistment and his journey through Europe late in the Second World War, as a colonel in a special US army unit charged with the retrieval of great art treasures looted and hidden by the Nazis. I owe much of my early interest in art to Sinclair’s erudite references to it throughout the series.

The books were out of print for many years. They were re-issued in paperback by Simon Publications about ten years ago, and this year Frederick Ellis published them in hardback. I would like to add these new books to the complete but tattered second-hand volumes that I have laboriously assembled over the years.

Every year is a political year; 2008 and 2010 have been especially so. They have also been the most volatile financially since the years in which most of Lanny Budd’s adventures take place. I wonder what Sinclair would think about the only United States Socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, representing Vermont? I suspect that Sinclair would not disapprove, although his own rhetoric might be a shade less restrained than Sanders’s. Sanders caucuses with the Democrats, in the same way as Sinclair nominally but opportunistically aligned himself with the Democrats in seeking the governorship of California. I hear echoes of that in the curious alliances, misalliances perhaps, in our recently elected parliament.

Naturally, more than fifty years on, the World’s End books could not have the same allure and glamour as they had when I first encountered them as a youth. But they are still highly readable, well written and moving. Current economics and politics give them a renewed relevance. You could do a lot worse than invest a few dollars and a considerable number of hours in buying and reading them soon. 

The Hon. I.D.F. Callinan is a former judge of the High Court of Australia, and a novelist.